Marina Malfatti was born on 25 April 1933 in Florence. Never a surname was less apt ("Mal fatti" in italian means "badly done"): blonde, tall, of classic beauty and a little austere, long and beautiful legs, with an aristocratic bearing and a Nordic charm, even for the severe and somewhat cold look.
She cultivates a passion for acting from a young age, and when seventeen she is already attending the acting school of René Simon at the Cours d 'Art Dramatique in Paris. Later she graduated from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome (in the 1958).
To discover her as a prose actress is Arnoldo Foà, but if the theater will be her true passion, it is thanks to cinema and above all to television, that she will become one of the most famous faces of the Italian show.
The silver screen discovered her in 1959 with Le cameriere of Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia. She gets the first important parts in the film Un uomo da bruciare (1962) by Valentino Orsini, I fuorilegge del matrimonio (1963) by the Taviani brothers and in the film by Giuliano Montaldo Una bella grinta (1965).
She made her debut on the small screen in the 1966 with the RAI series Le inchieste del commissario Maigret, with Gino Cervi, in the episode "The Chinese Shadow", followed by the successful series Sherlock Holmes, the TV movie Dal tuo al mio (1969) by Mario Landi, taken from a text by Verga, for which she was awarded the "Premio Verga", but above all she obtained a resounding success in the role of the marquis Marina del Malombra, in Malombra (1974), a drama from the novel of Fogazzaro.
In the seventies she is much sought after in genre cinema and the reason is easy to say: with her skill she elevates the quality of the film, while with beauty she entertains a wider audience. She attended both the vein of western (Il ritorno di Clint il solitario - 1972 by Alfonso Balcázar) and the thriller (La notte che Evelyn uscì dalla tomba - 1971, La dama rossa uccide sette volte - 1972 by E. P. Miraglia, Tutti i colori del buio - 1972 by Sergio Martino, Sette orchidee macchiate di rosso - 1972 by Umberto Lenzi, Il prato macchiato di rosso - 1973 by Riccardo Ghione, Un fiocco nero per Deborah - 1974 by Marcello Andrei), becoming a true icon of this particular genre of Italian cinema.
From the mid-seventies she progressively distanced herself from the silver screen, turning her art to the theater, but reserving herself some sporadic return to the TV. On the stage she interprets many classics, but not only (Moravia writes for her own "La cintura"), and becomes a first woman of the Italian theater, like Anna Proclemer and Valeria Morriconi, but surpassing them in beauty, and in 1983 her interpretation in "Elettra" earned her the "Maschera d’Argento" award.
In the nineties she joins in an artistic association with Luigi Squarzina, with whom he puts on the works of Pirandello, Goldoni, Cocteau and Shaw, to enhance her, especially in dramatic roles.
In the 2000s she brought to the stage several works including "Sorelle Materassi" (2006), "Gallina vecchia" by Maccarinelli (2007) and finally her latest performance: "Va dove ti porta il cuore" Giordano (2008).
Long withdrawn from the scene and from public life, especially since she was widowed by Ambassador Umberto La Rocca, from whom she had no children, she left silently at the age of 83, on 8 June 2016 in Rome.